Lighthouse
by lumixedia
Summary: Years after the events of The Final Problem, Sherlock and John have worked things out between them and are getting married. Mycroft, to his horror, is drafted as Sherlock's best man. How can he explain to anyone, let alone an audience of a hundred wedding guests, what his brother means to him? Inspired by the wedding speech scene from The Sign of Three.


"Um."

Wrong. Wrong, from the very first word. Everyone in Mycroft's family, of course including himself, had always prided themselves on their precise speech. "Um" was the least auspicious start possible.

"Um." _Again? Get it together._ "I told Sherlock putting me up here would be courting disaster. He assured me that any mistakes I made would at worst humiliate me, not him, and therefore disaster was just fine. Since he was forewarned, I hope all of you will apportion blame correspondingly."

Mycroft glared at his audience for emphasis. Sherlock smirked to his right; the next seat down, John rolled his eyes.

"You can still prevent this, Sherlock," Mycroft added, turning to him. "I am confident that Greg could do an excellent job, even without preparation. Alternatively, it would suffice to choose any one of your guests with a random number generator."

"But none of them would suffer like you," Sherlock said cheerily. The wedding guests laughed. John rolled his eyes again.

Mycroft sighed. "I don't disagree." There was no putting it off further. Speech. Best man's speech. Give it. He had to. For Sherlock and John. How was any of this possible? How had it all come to this?

("Congratulations."

"Six minutes," came Sherlock's voice over the phone. "You're getting old." It was an elated voice, a soaring voice, an I-can't-believe-I-found-the-missing-thing voice. If he could hear that voice coming from Sherlock every day, he would need nothing else to be happy.

"As a matter of fact, I was delayed from calling by work matters," said Mycroft defensively. "When shall the wedding be?"

"Whenever we have it"-that was John speaking now-"you know you can't skip it this time."

"Or what?"

"Or"-Sherlock again-"I won't have a best man."

Mycroft stared at his cell phone, which was sitting on his desk in speaker mode, in total confusion. This was some Sherlockian riddle he didn't understand. He kept staring until the phone asked "Are you still there?" in Sherlock's voice.

"I give up," he said. "What's the joke?"

"There's no joke. You're going to be my best man."

"John, what's the joke?"

"There's no joke." John again, laughing. "Really, there isn't."

Mycroft cursed inwardly and hung up.

It took several more days and the combined efforts of Greg, Molly, and Mrs. Hudson to make him believe that there had been no joke. Actually, even now, he wasn't completely sure.)

"Um," Mycroft said. _No! Enough!_ Just start. Just jump. "Before Sherlock was born"-jump, just jump-"...I had no one."

(It was one of those many arguments with Eurus he always regretted starting, if indeed it was him who started them-he could never remember. It might have begun with him saying something like "I never had friends when I was five, either. That's not enough explanation for what you did." Why would he say that? Was he really hoping that she would give more of an explanation if he asked enough?

"Are you implying," Eurus would have replied, "that you turned out better than me?"

"Better is an imprecise term." He already knew he'd lost control of the conversation. It was impossible not to, staring at his sister through the layered glass, under the vaguely sickening blueish-white lights, in a cell whose damp coldness was a constant reminder that they were in the middle of the stormy ocean, far away from all that was warm and good in the world. Mycroft's pilgrimages to Sherrinford were, simply put, the worst part of his life, and utterly futile besides-Eurus had met everything he'd ever said or done with hostility and contempt. But he had to speak to her, because speaking to her was _risky_ , and he didn't believe in letting other people take risks for him.

"That's right!" Eurus exclaimed delightedly, as if he were a slow pupil who'd given an unexpectedly good answer. "You certainly turned out _different_. You follow _rules_. You take _orders_. But _better_ , that's a judgment for other people to make, isn't it? And none of your rule-following has made anyone like you more. Nobody could stand us when we were five, and nobody can stand us now. The only difference between you and me is that you've resigned yourself to being invisible."

"Caring is not an advantage," Mycroft said tiredly. _If you stop before doing what's necessary to care whether anyone will be grateful, it only slows you down._

Eurus laughed. "Then it's too bad, isn't it, that you can't help but care? Trapped in a prison of your own making, and you won't even scream for help because you can't admit that you don't want to be inside. After all, we were supposed to break you out, weren't we? It's _hilarious_ to think of now, but before we flew away and left you behind, we were supposed to save you.")

"I had no one. I found humans bewildering, as I still do. And I became fixated on a very particular solution. If Mummy and Daddy would only give me a sibling, as the other children all seemed to have, that would change everything.

Every day I begged them. When they asked me whether I would rather have a little brother or a little sister, I said 'both'. Of course, they wanted more children in any case. But I like to think that I hurried the process along a little, that because of me, Sherlock became my brother, rather than a different child born on a slightly later date.

I suggested that they name my brother Minister. That is all the evidence you need of the gap between my expectations for Sherlock-and the far more remarkable reality."

Mycroft was only vaguely aware of his audience's attention, of the reminiscent gaze that passed over his parents' faces, of Sherlock startling at the idea of being named "Minister". He kept his eyes on the thread of the story he was trying to tell, which stretched out in front of him as he pulled it slowly, painstakingly, from his heart. He had never spoken like this before, had never forced to the surface anything buried so deep. If his focus faltered for a single moment, he would lose the thread immediately.

"From the beginning, Sherlock confounded me at every turn. The harder I tried to contain him, the more he slipped out of my grasp. I taught him arithmetic to help him understand the world, but he used his newfound skills to track my calorie consumption and tell me it was too high. I taught him how to swim so he wouldn't drown, but that just made him swim farther out to sea than I had ever dared."

His audience liked that part, because he'd chosen his examples carefully. Of all the puzzles his mother had given him-metal knots, wooden cubes with hidden gears, logic riddles, maths problems-this was the one he had never solved: how was it possible to protect his brother and sister from themselves and from each other, when every attempt to guide them backfired spectacularly? Only someone who had been there-only his parents, who were watching him with shining faces, and Sherlock, who sat perfectly still beside him-would be able to hear the darker notes behind his innocuous, wedding-appropriate words.

(It was a quiet Saturday afternoon. Mummy and Daddy had gone shopping. Twelve-year-old Mycroft was on the sofa reading a book, Eurus was playing violin in the corner, and Sherlock was in his room-

"EURUS KILLED EDWARD!"

Sherlock burst into the living room, crying, a little turtle in his outstretched hand.

Mycroft jumped to his feet, horrified. He should have known. He had _seen_ Eurus in the basement staring at the shelf where various household substances-including, he now remembered, rat poison-were kept. She had said she was just reading the labels. The shelf was behind a locked glass door, but when had that ever stopped her?

And she had made no secret of her dislike for the turtle, which Sherlock and Victor Trevor had caught together. She kept telling Sherlock that pets were for people who thought humans lived too long. Whether her problem was the turtle itself, or its association with Victor, had never been clear. He should have known.

Eurus had continued playing her violin as if oblivious to Sherlock's entrance. Mycroft walked up to her, though he already knew confronting her would do no good. "Eurus," he said, putting as much authority into his voice as he could muster, "explain yourself!"

Eurus ignored him.

With a shriek, Sherlock marched up to her and made a grab for the violin. Eurus held on to it, stubbornly trying to keep the bow moving over the strings even with Sherlock in the way.

"Sherlock, don't-" Mycroft protested.

Sherlock, the stronger child, wrestled the violin out of Eurus's grasp and began smashing it against the floor.

"No! Sherlock! Stop!" Mycroft tried to grab the violin, but Sherlock dodged him and ran away, alternately throwing the violin as far in front of him as he could and running after it so he could pick it up and throw it again. Mycroft chased him, but his little brother was impossibly agile and he was just the opposite. And then, having followed Sherlock into the kitchen, he realized he should never have gone after him at all, because now Eurus was alone-

Mycroft skidded to a halt and backtracked into the living room. Eurus wasn't there. Neither was the dead turtle, which Sherlock had put down carefully on the coffee table before attacking her.

"EURUS!" With Sherlock still stomping on the remnants of the violin in the kitchen, Mycroft charged painfully upstairs. Her room was locked. He banged on the door, got no response, picked the lock as quickly as he could with shaking hands, and shoved the door open to find her sitting on the floor, carefully dissecting the turtle with a small knife.

It was at this point that footsteps and rustling at the front door indicated that Mummy and Daddy were back.

Mycroft envied Sherlock. He would have liked to scream and break something, too, but he, unlike his brother, never gave in to such urges. His parents' return would help nothing. They would sigh and look at Mycroft with disappointment, as if he should have done better, as if they had hoped he could keep his siblings under control when they themselves could not. They would try to speak to the children and fail, try to discipline Eurus and fail. They would buy a new violin, move the rat poison behind a more secure lock, and hold a burial ceremony for the turtle, they would do everything good parents did, but everything wasn't enough. Sherlock and Eurus would somehow make up temporarily and play violin together, but then something else would happen and the family would fall apart again.)

"When our sister was institutionalized, I became ever more determined to keep Sherlock on a straight and narrow path where I thought he would be safe, even as it became ever clearer that his mind and heart were far too expansive to fit within it. In this way our relationship became ever more difficult."

("You have to make a list!"

Sherlock was a year out of university, spending his time loitering around Scotland Yard arguing with anyone who would listen. People had, in fact, begun to listen, which was why he had had a meeting there scheduled that evening. Alarms were raised when he didn't show up.

It had taken Mycroft an hour of detective work to locate his brother. Then, once he was in the hospital and on life support, it transpired that the doctors didn't know what to do next, because they couldn't figure out what he'd taken. Whatever chemicals were in his system, they weren't the usual drugs. Sherlock had been _experimenting_.

It took Mycroft several more hours to locate all the people, ingredients, and underground laboratories involved, to trace who had bought what from whom and mixed it with what and recommended what dose, and, finally, to come up with an approximate list of Sherlock's recent experiments. The list was not enough, either-it didn't change the fact that the doctors had never seen a patient like Sherlock. So the hours after that were spent searching through medical journals in government libraries, looking for articles that might be of relevance to a substance on the list. Mycroft worked with a pure, uninterrupted mania, feeling no tiredness, feeling really nothing at all.

Once prepared, he returned to the hospital-it was now perhaps four in the morning-to direct Sherlock's care. He ordered the attending doctors around with a crispness so natural they obeyed without even realizing. He sat next to Sherlock's bed, alert as a general in battle, monitoring every ragged breath, every bead of sweat, every twitch and moan and change in temperature, comparing the progress of each indicator over time with the trajectory sketched in his notes.

Occasionally, just a little more often than was necessary to test temperature and sweat levels, he would touch Sherlock's hand, or forehead, or cheek. He would pull away quickly, knowing that otherwise he might start _feeling_ something, and he could not afford that until the emergency was over.

Sometime in the middle of the following day, it became clear that Sherlock was improving, and in fact would probably wake up in the next half-hour. Mycroft clasped his hands in his lap and waited. Sherlock opened his eyes exactly on schedule. "Mycroft," he whispered. "What are you doing here?"

"You have to make a list!" Mycroft shouted. "I don't understand what the appeal of poisoning yourself is to begin with, but if you're going to do it, you have to make a list! Nobody can help you without knowing what you've taken!"

Sherlock groaned and rolled his eyes.

"Promise me. Promise me, Sherlock! I won't leave until you promise me that if this happens again, THERE WILL BE A LIST!"

"Is that a deal? I promise, you leave?"

Sherlock's words prodded at Mycroft's numb core, pricked it, brought him close to _feeling_ something again. He rapidly suppressed the sensation. The emergency wasn't over. "Yes, it's a deal."

"I promise," Sherlock said.)

"By the time John Watson came along, I had lost hope of solving the puzzle of Sherlock Holmes. No matter what I did, Sherlock was a force of nature beyond my reckoning. And yet John, the miracle doctor, worked it out without even trying. Once Sherlock had John, my failures no longer mattered. I watched as my impossible brother became the extraordinary human being I always knew he was meant to be. I watched him grow into the person you see now, who is open whenever I am blinkered, and strong whenever I am weak.

Sherlock, with John, have defeated threats to the nation you've never even heard of. Threats I told them to back off of, because I was afraid. But those two are never afraid."

("You'll find that the Holmes family is not as close or loving as others you have targeted," Mycroft told a smirking Charles Augustus Magnussen. "Threatening Sherlock will give you no purchase with me."

That was what he said. What he was thinking, frantically, was: _how can he possibly have a hold on Sherlock?_

Magnussen leered at him, unmoved by his lie. "Let me give you a little taste," he said, as if answering the question in Mycroft's head. "Just a small free sample. Mary Watson."

 _Damn it_ , Mycroft thought. _I should have known._ Out loud, he said, "I don't understand."

"Oh, we both know all about _Mary Watson_ ," Magnussen said, pronouncing Dr. Watson's wife's name slowly, as if rolling it around on his tongue. "They used to call her Rosamund. The avenging angel of America and Britain. In the underworld, they whispered that it was bad luck merely to say her last name."

"Really," Mycroft said, keeping his face still and his intonation skeptical. _Damn him._

"I know _so many people_ who want her dead," Magnussen whispered. "Your foolish brother swore a vow to protect her. To protect them-John and Mary Watson and the baby. The baby! Think of the devastation, the guilt. And you can't even warn them, because Mary doesn't want anyone to know that she's been a naughty, naughty girl."

Magnussen raised his index finger and tapped Mycroft on the nose. Mycroft did not move, and said nothing. "Just a little free sample. There's so much more where that came from. Irene Adler-some nasty business in China-I could go on-but the sample is enough, don't you think? I worked it all out, you see. Owning Mary means owning John, and owning John means owning Sherlock, and owning Sherlock means owning you. So, if your brother should ever develop a desire to investigate me, I would be much obliged if you gently suggest that he refrain."

Of course, this had played out the way everything did. Mycroft had done his best, kept his secrets, tried to minimize risks, and the situation had exploded anyway. Sherlock had been reckless and stupidly brave, and that was what it had taken to solve the problem.)

"What can I say? They're so _good_. Even their mistakes are good. Sherlock once misled me to arrest Lady Elizabeth Smallwood and accuse her of treason, but somehow that episode ended in us becoming friends, and here she is with me today." He glanced at Lady Smallwood's table, and she smiled back at him. Friendship. What a strange, implausible thing, for someone to make room for him in her life voluntarily, not merely because she was obligated to by blood.

"And, of course, Sherlock made our family whole again. For decades I tried to speak to our sister but could not reach her, until he found her and brought her to land. He found me, too, that day, when I didn't even know I was lost."

("HOW DARE YOU!"

Everybody froze. They were gathered in Mycroft's living room-Sherlock, Dr. Watson, and Mrs. Hudson, who would be staying in his house for a while, and Greg, who was just there to keep an eye on everyone-talking about everything and nothing in particular, trying to wrap their minds around the day's events, and Sherlock, who had seemed basically calm and normal up to that point, had exploded out of nowhere.

"HOW DARE YOU!" he shouted at Mycroft. "UNBELIEVABLE! TO EVEN THINK OF A TRICK LIKE THAT! TO IMAGINE THERE WAS ANY CHANCE IT WOULD WORK! DO YOU THINK I DON'T KNOW YOU? DO YOU THINK SO LITTLE OF ME?"

There was a short pause as everyone stared at Sherlock, who was standing with his fists balled.

"It was worth-" Mycroft started.

"Sherlock, this isn't-" Dr. Watson said at the same time.

"-Worth a try-"

"-This isn't going to help-"

"-What else was I supposed to-"

"WHAT ELSE WERE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO? NOTHING! YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING! YOU ALWAYS THINK YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING! YOU ALWAYS THINK-"

"You can't expect me to just stand there and watch-"

"Mycroft, I think what Sherlock means-"

"YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT I NEED! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ME AT ALL! YOU TOSS AROUND A FEW INSULTS AND THEN WHAT, THEN I'LL BE ABLE TO LIVE WITH MYSELF? YOU COULD HAVE HELPED ME THINK OF A WAY OUT-"

"YOUR CHOSEN WAY OUT WAS TO _POINT THE GUN AT YOURSELF_!" Mycroft yelled, leaping to his feet. "IF YOU'D BEEN WRONG-"

" _Enough!_ " Dr. Watson stood up and grabbed Sherlock, who seemed on the verge of violence, firmly by the arm. "Sherlock and I are going to take a walk. We all had a horrible experience today and we're not as ready to talk about it as I thought we were. We're going to get some air, get some sleep, and try again tomorrow. Okay?" Without waiting for an answer, he spun around and marched Sherlock toward the front door. The others watched them leave silently. Mycroft slumped back into his chair.

"I don't understand what just happened," Greg said. "Are you two mad at each other for caring about each other too much?"

"Aren't they always?" said Mrs. Hudson.

"I thought it would work," Mycroft muttered, ignoring them. "Why wouldn't I try it if I thought it would work?"

"You always make the same mistake," Greg said. "You always forget that brotherhood goes both ways.")

"So, brother mine, I was right when I was seven," Mycroft said. For the first time he risked turning to his right, but Sherlock's eyes were lowered, his posture unreadable. "I was wise when I was seven. I had no idea what you would become. I could not have imagined all the ways you would outshine me, outsmart me, and change me. I could not have foreseen our sorrows and misunderstandings. But I predicted that after all the time I spent lost and mystified among other humans, you would be my lighthouse. And that came true. You are a lighthouse, for me and so many others. May you and John shine through the stormy nights for many years to come."

There was a ringing silence.

Then, quite suddenly-one moment Sherlock was still sitting and staring at the table, and the next-Mycroft found himself wrapped in his brother's arms. He felt something warm and wet fall on his neck.

"No regrets?" he whispered, smiling, as the clapping and cheering began.

Sherlock mumbled incoherently into his shoulder.

Despite the overabundance of people, Mycroft shocked himself by staying for the entire wedding.


End file.
